Sunday, May 30, 2010

This is esoteric stuff from my Water, Wood and a Wolf blog, but may be of vague interest to some of my new Israeli readers.

As suggested below, the "return of the King" - Aragorn suggests death of Golem/Shadow and rise of Temple Mount and rebirth of Israel. This picture is not clear, but the symbolism on King Aragorn's chest is a menorah in the design of a tree: three stars to the left, three to the right and a heightened symbol in the center:

The several elements in Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings” suggest restoration of Temple Mount. The Towers, the Golem. As I have been writing along here and in Quigley in Exile, Golem, from Rabbi Loeb’s dream of Golem in the 1600s marked the "end of light” in Europe – European and world Jews would then bifurcate to Extroverts, who would move outward with the gentiles in commerce and banking, and Introverts who would then move inward; that is, back to Israel. This would be the beginning of The Return. Golem would mark the external path to the present day in pop culture: Find Quaternities in pop culture and the “son” figure is frequently Golem – traces of this in Seinfeld where George is “son” (Seinfeld father, Cosmo Trickster, etc.), all neurotic and unable. No karma left at end of Pisces. The Twin Towers - Tolkien's second book - caused concern here because when the movie was released and the twin trade centers in New York were destroyed as parallel event, as if we were on a “gateway” to the age – the Age of Aquarius opened in 2001, year of the Twin Towers 9/11 tragedy. The subtheme in this story is the death of Golem; the end of the dark (shadow) aspect of the Jewish Extravert trail (which Moshe Feiglin scorns today in his weekly newslette). That is matched by the “Return of the King.” We shift today to the positive karma and suggest, in Templar terms, the rise again of Temple Mount. And it is what we hear again today & what I’ve been writing about these past months. I had been thinking it had different reference, but as Golem is in essence a Jewish reference,l the counterpart, King, likely implies the rise of Israel.

This image of the "Fantastic 4" in the naive culture is characteristic of a Quaternity featuring Golem as "Son." As I understand it, Stan Lee, who did this and most of the "super heroes" was a Jewish immigrant to New York. This would suggest a quest for Self which new (maybe all) Americans feel when they leave their "gods" (archetypes) behind in Europe. Golem's name here is "Ben" - Hebrew for "Son." This is a classic Quaternity: Father, Son, Trickster (fire boy), and Psyche (sister to "fire boy."). Quaternity is common in pop culture, "The Wizard of Oz" being most representative of American karma, born of the Plains. But "Seinfeld" and "Frazier" are telling Quaternities as well.

Thursday, May 27, 2010

Israel as a Jewish State

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 5/27/10

Should Israel be a Jewish state as England is a Protestant state*? As Tibet was a Buddhist state before the communist invasion? A lot of Americans probably think it already is. It is not. In the phrase of Moshe Feiglin, leader of the Manhigut Yehudit faction of the Likud, it is simply a “state for Jews.” But this will be the historic question that rises now to new generations here and in Israel as we enter into the new century.

“This year, with G-d's help,” writes Feiglin, an orthodox, native-born Israeli, “there will be more Jews in Israel than anywhere else in the world. This is a sea change in the state of the Jewish nation and the first time since the First Temple era that the majority of Jews has resided in Israel. This summer we start the countdown to the end of the exile.”

Unfortunately, though, it is also the worst of times. Anti-Semitism is exploding all over the world. The State of Israel is rapidly losing the legitimacy for its very existence. “Simply put,” he says, “our successful state has turned into a pirate ship. Ahmadinijad can fly wherever he wants, while Deputy Prime Minister Moshe Ya'alon dares not land in Europe. It is now fashionable in academia to talk about the day after the destruction of the State of Israel.”

Should there be a Jewish state, commentator Daniel Pipes asks in National Review Online? That is the central question. It does not help anyone to distract from it.

It was long assumed that the Egypt-Israel peace treaty of 1979 would end Arab-Israeli conflict but it had the perverse effect of making other states and also the Egyptian populace more anti-Zionist, Pipes writes. Then in the 1980s Palestinian recognition of Israel gave birth to a hope that the conflict would close. The total failure of the 1993 Oslo Accords buried that expectation.

“What now,” he asks? “Starting about 2007, a new focus emerged: winning acceptance of Israel as a sovereign Jewish state.”

Palestinian leaders responded with howls of outrage, declaring that they “absolutely refused” to accept Israel as a Jewish state. “On taking over the prime ministry in early 2009, Benjamin Netanyahu reiterated Olmert’s point in his diplomacy. Regrettably, the Obama administration endorsed the Palestinian position, again sidelining the Israeli demand.”

It would seem to a distant (Buddhist) outsider here in New Hampshire, that a race of people so tenacious that it would survive Romans and Pharaohs, a thousand plagues and curses and after that Hitler and Stalin, that Hillary and Bono would be a cake walk. But Israel is threatened today not by bombs and programs, but by vague, globalist ideology and makeshift rock and roll utopianism which seems cobbled together at Starbucks after a late night.

War changes people but the Clintons and Obama seem much the same as they were before 9/11 and five years of war in the Middle East. But we will want to know how do Sarah Palin, Mitt Romney, Mike Huckabee, George Pataki, Rick Perry and any others who might seek the Oval Office in 2012 feel about Israel as a Jewish state.

* England’s government is called a Parliamentary Monarchy. The monarch for England is Queen Elizabeth II. The monarch, also known as the Crown, is the head of state in England. It serves as the head of the judiciary, commander in chief of the armed forces, supreme governor of the Church of England, and Church of Scotland, and summons and dismisses Parliament and ministers of the cabinet.

Monday, May 24, 2010

The end of "Lost" - Jack Shephard is the Aquarian

As per the earlier theme of shifting the "time style" from Pisces to Aquarius, the interior story ends with Jack at the light/fountain (Self) in the center of the island repairing the karma by replacing he sacred stone - much as John Locke repaired the "time style" when Ben broke it. The water pours forth. Jack is the Waterpourer; the iconic figure in the symbol of Aquarius in the zodiac pouring water from a vase; freeing the creative consciousness for the new millenia. Nice at the end the eye closes; like Khrishna going back to sleep at the end of Maharabarata. That figure - Waterpourer - is known as the Titan.

Saturday, May 22, 2010

Cuba, Mexico, Obama vs. America

Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 5/24/10

I can’t think of any time in our history when a sitting American president has publicly and conspicuously allied himself with a foreign leader in direct opposition to a sitting American Governor, as President Barack Obama has done this past week with Arizona Governor Jan Brewer. And the president of a broken country run by drug lords at that. As anticipated, as if on cue, Cuba immediately chimed in to support the alliance. Possibly this is the new “international order” that the President talked about at the West Point graduation this weekend.

Obama sees himself as a citizen of the world and probably as a world god-king like Elvis, Michael Jackson and that delusional Lord Jim, Bill Clinton. But he consciously senses to himself that his conversation and congress as President is with only parts of America. To the parts below the Mason-Dixon Line he dictates. To the parts east of Tahoe, he dictates. To those rubes and red necks in Alaska he doesn’t speak at all.

Surely, before he goes on vacation to a safe house in Martha’s Vineyard this summer, Rahm Emmanuel will rig something up for him out there in the despised heartland; a quick photo-op in the Grand Canyon, like last year, or maybe doing something like pretending to admire a NASCAR stock car and quipping with the driver about engines. (Does he even know how to drive? Did he ever own a car?) But he is alienated and afraid in these parts. He not only does not like these people, but like his friends in Martha’s Vineyard – a day’s sail from where I grew up - he thinks they are boorish. He thinks they are stupid. He thinks they are dangerous and underdeveloped. They are not impressed that he was the editor of the Harvard Law Review. It is nerve wracking. They do not even like lawyers. And increasingly, they do not like him either.

As Calderon appears arm and arm with Obama at the White House and condemns America to an adoring Congress, AP reports that Cuban lawmakers have passed a resolution denouncing Arizona's new immigration law as "racist and xenophobic," recalling an old dispute in the process: the argument that the United States' purchase of Arizona from Mexico in the 19th century was tantamount to theft. The tightly controlled, communist-run island has long been criticized for its human rights record, which includes the jailing of 200 political prisoners, the banning of a free press and the outlawing of opposition political parties.

Cuban citizens are required to carry identification with them wherever they go, and can be stopped by police and sent home if they are found in a part of the island where they don't belong.

Three astrological levels on the TV show “Lost” – Sawyer and Kate are the Adam and Eve of Aquarius

As we cross into the Age of Aquarius out of the Age of Pisces, three levels of astrological time are present, going back 6,000 years to the time of Jacob. During the run of the series Jacob and his Shadow, Man in Black, the smoke monster are the old protectors of the light. Ben Linus and Richard Albert are their external agents in the world. Ben – identified as the Christ in the second season by the chest wound and the book, Brother’s K – representing the beginning of the Age of Pisces with Richard Alpert, known as Baba Ram Dass in the Sixties, representing the end – he started the hippie movement with Timothy Leary, his co-professor at Harvard.

Entering Aquarius now with Jacob dead and the smoke monster transferred to John Locke, Jack, son of “Christian Shepherd” takes the role of Guardian. The external agents here should be Desmond (who played Jesus in an earlier movie) and Hurley – both these have avatar karma – Hurley speaks to the Unconscious direct; listens to the dead, while Desmond, like Brahma is immune to the peaks (Vishnu) and troughs (Shiva) of the light. Leaving Kate and Sawyer to be the new Adam and Eve of Aquarius.

Wednesday, May 19, 2010

For the "Big Questions" board at The Hill:

Rand Paul’s victory is particularly significant. He is Clu Gulager handsome and tough; simple and honest and unflappable and could rise as a folk hero in the heartland, where all American folk heroes – Johnny Cash, Chuck Yeager - come from. He brings (returns) into American homes and communities the specific common-sense family values of the Paul family. Without the Pauls, the Tea Party movement was an amorphous cry in the woods, sincere but exploitable by old Republican hacks and with the potential of falling into the hands of extremists. Its feet are on the ground now. Ideas of Austrian economics and small government can now grow and mature into the mainstream.

There are three issues in the Arizona situation. In order of importance they are: A state’s right to act without permission from the federal government, chronic federal incompetence and mismanagement and the third: Is the controversial Arizona plan a good and workable plan in controlling the border? I was struck by the clarity of Morgan Elizabeth Woolard’s - Miss Oklahoma’s - “simple declarative sentence”; Hemingway’s model for emphatic prose, and her grace under pressure (more Hemingway) in answering the question on these issues by Oscar Nunez. “I’m a huge believer in states’ rights,” she said.

She is against illegal immigration but she is also against racial profiling. But because her first premise is states’ rights, she thinks it is therefore allowable for Arizona to create that law even though it may not be a great law. She did not say it was a good law. As Texas governor Rick Perry said, it is not. But compared to recent comments by Attorney General Eric Holder and Janet Napolitano, Secretary of Homeland Security, Woolard’s was a pretty good answer.

Napolitano and Holder responded in interviews to the first issue: States rights. States should not be allowed to act on their own. But their commentary gave more evidence to the second issue, federal incompetence.

As the Manchester Union reports, Holder has publicly worried that Arizona's new immigration law will lead to racial profiling and is unconstitutional. He even suggested that the Justice Department might sue Arizona to overturn the law. But, as the Washington Times reported, Mr. Holder acknowledged to the [congressional] panel he hadn't read the law he was criticizing, and he gave conflicting accounts on whether he had talked to the team that was reviewing it.

Napolitano’s prose was more elliptical than Miss Oklahoma’s. She said the Arizona law “ . . . was not a law I would have signed.”For what reason, asked Senator McCain? Because “It’s a bad law enforcement law . . .” she said. (Say what?) She said she was familiar with laws “of that ilk.” But also admitted to Senator McCain that she had not read the law.

PJ Crowley, the assistant secretary of state for public affairs, criticizing the Arizona law on national TV also admitted that he had not read the 17-page law.Woolard was absolutely ready for the question, she said. “I just spoke from my heart and I believe what I said was well said and I feel strongly about that and I'm proud of my answer.” As well she should be. In a political season of intentional misspeaks, official deception and outright lies her candid and forthright delivery was a simple, declarative delight.

Monday, May 17, 2010

Nikki Haley, Sarah Palin and Jenny Sanford: The Three Sisters awaken

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 5/17/10

They were there at Arthur’s death and at the beginning of Siegfried’s ride; the Three Sisters are harbingers of mythic beginnings and endings calling from native hills and rivers. So the arrival of Jenny Sanford in the morning and Sarah Palin in the evening to support Nikki Haley in the South Carolina governor’s race is most auspicious.

She already has Mitt Romney’s support and by now she has caught national attention. Nikki Haley represents a rising political tide in conservatism in America and she was an early favorite of the Tea Party movement. As this movement is being vilified in the MSM, it is finding common sense in Rand Paul in Kentucky and solid and formidable structure and determination in Tim Bridgewater in Utah. Haley brings to it disciple and a knack for organization, and with Palin and Sanford in tow it may be suggested, that primal strength of character of that the Three Sisters archetype suggest.

“It is a tremendous honor to receive Governor Palin’s endorsement. Sarah Palin has energized the conservative movement like few others in our generation. She has helped millions of Americans find the power of their voice. I am extremely proud that she has offered her support to my candidacy,” said Haley.

Haley, a state representative from Lexington, has been an advocate for fiscal responsibility, transparency in government, and conservative values since her first day as a state legislator in 2005.

“I’m very proud to add my voice to Jenny Sanford’s and others in endorsing Nikki Haley for governor of South Carolina,” said Palin. “Nikki is a strong pro-life, pro-Second Amendment fiscal conservative who served with distinction as a state lawmaker, a reformer who fought her own party to protect the interests of the taxpayer, a proud daughter of immigrants who worked night and day to achieve the American dream, a wife of an officer in the Army National Guard, a board member at her family’s Methodist church, and – most proudly – the loving mother of two beautiful kids.”

Inevitably, misfortune falls to a state when it is revealed that a sitting governor like Mark Sanford reads lusty romances like The Thorn Birds. Fate is sure to ensue, as it has. But in the way of the Trickster, the world is then given Jenny Sanford who many in South Carolina regard as the organizational backbone and powerhouse behind her husband’s political success.

Mrs. Sanford endorsed Haley’s candidacy for governor in November, saying, “[W]hen I’m asked my wish for South Carolina’s future, my wish is for a leader of state government like Nikki Haley. She’s principled, conservative, tough, and smart.”

Thursday, May 13, 2010

How Clinton-era “diversity” hobbled black progress in the South

By Bernie Quigley

30 years ago I had an essay in the Philadelphia Inquirer making the point that racial integration in the South had become a project primarily to satisfy the white liberal imagination of northern people rather than to advance the economic progress of black people in the South. While the South had effectively integrated in the 1960s, the north and Philadelphia, where I lived, had not.

The South, white and black, shared a cultural core in religion, primarily Baptist, of a form which might be considered indigenous to America and to that region, while both religious Southern whites and blacks were inherently alien to the commence-based materialistic culture of Philadelphia and the north.

Not long after I worked in a college in the South which made sincere effort to integrate along the lines of culture, region and religion. It was a great opportunity. Economy was booming. Poor blacks and blacks from the country where heart was trusted over head could find a natural and organic cohesion with whites in the Baptist chapel. But what destroyed those honest attempts can be understood in two words: “diversity and globalization.”

Diversity became the buzzword in the Clinton era. It took the college administrator, whose job it was to raise funds, off the hook. Problems related to race in the South no longer need be seen as specific economic issues caused by historic conditions; problems fully amenable and with corrections well underway. They became instead aesthetic issues. Race and ethnicity became an abstraction: Prejudice is so fifties. And not just prejudice against blacks, but against everybody. You could substitute Chinese instead. Rich ones. Or East Indians. Rich ones. Or gay people, or Iranians, or Valley Girls or Zoroastrians. The possibilities were endless.

The few rural and religious blacks brought in after that were like Kafka’s hunger artist: Short term exotic novelties soon lost and forgotten in the hay when the novelty wore off. Actually heard O.J. Simpson make the point on “Saturday Night” back then: Blacks, he said, had become boring to white liberals. They had stopped, then moved on. The poor and working-class Southern blacks huddled by themselves – country bumpkins virtually outcast by well off blacks as well as whites in the new upscale cultural environment – with the few religious Southern whites in the Pat Robertson corner.

Travelling recently with one of my sons to Southern colleges these past weeks, the morph seemed complete. There were tons of Indians, Chinese and other Asians on campuses as there are elsewhere. I inquired and was told that rich foreign students pay the way for poor blacks and poor local white kids.

The school tour guide in one school in particular that had a long and laudable Baptist tradition going back to the 1840s, was obviously embarrassed by the Southern religious heritage. She was from New Jersey. Yes, there were Baptists here long ago – shudder - but now this is the center of the school, she said, proudly pointing to her sorority house. She guided the tour away from the historic chapel and avoided the topics of race, religion and culture like the plague.

No question, the school was fully globalized. But there seemed to be only enough American black students - great looking ones, like models for J. Crew or Abercrombie & Fitch - in view to supply the school’s front office in years ahead – or those of political offices or news outlets - and the college brochures and to give a little talk on MLK day.

Tuesday, May 11, 2010

Alamo uprising advances: Bad news for Romney. Who is Tim Bridgewater?

by Bernie Quigley

for The Hill on 5/11/10

Say what you like about Mexicans in Arizona, legal or not, but they are hard working there and everyplace else they go. And if they didn’t go there the work won’t get done. In 1994 I wrote a long article about the migrant workers in the tobacco fields of Yadkin County, North Carolina, where a few dozen Mexicans were cutting tobacco. I asked their Catholic padre how many of them were illegal. “All of them,” he said. I brought it up to the governor and the wealthiest Democrat in the state – both of whom had cut tobacco when they were kids – and they were shocked. Shocked! But not the farmers. They’d been exclusively using Mexican labor for almost 20 years.

They are to the Southwest and the West what the Irish were to New York and Boston 150 years ago. They do the work. They in the near generations will inherit the culture, just as the Irish did Boston. And so will the Mormons. The ride of this most astonishing American life force from Vermont to Utah is not yet over. In fact, it is just advancing. Both these people awaken together as the West awakens.

The New York-based left may still be stuck in the 1930s with Roosevelt, but as Robert Samuelson said yesterday in the Washington Post, the days of the welfare state are numbered. Europe and America are changing perceptively in the same political pattern across the spectrum; the left and the maudlin conservative middle, which are often indistinguishable, are feeling the pain of unabashed and original conservative populism. It is a change in temperament. The religious conservative force of Moshe Feiglin’s Jewish Leadership faction presses against the Americanized (New York) establishment in Israel. A new conservatism challenges England and they are having to bargain their way out of disaster. And it is coming to Germany. But the template can be seen in the Southwest and particularly in the Utah primary.

The denial of the press is palpable: Ask any politico or pundit in D.C., “Who lost the Republican convention in Utah?” The three-term, 76-year-old incumbent, Bob Bennett. Ask who won. No answer. The hundreds of articles written about this primary are about who lost, not who won. As in Isreal’s recent Likud election, they are about what is passing and what is just holding on, not about what is beginning. The answer is that Tim Bridgewater won by a good margin at 57%. Mike Lee came in second with 42%. These two are considered “Tea Party favorites” but Bridgewater just seems like a smart and capable characteristic Westerner; a self-made man one who didn’t go to Harvard and who hasn’t yet plugged into the establishment. He grew up in a double-wide in West Jordan and went to Snow College on a football scholarship.

No question, the passing of Bennett, from the political scene marks a transition. The traditionalists, like New York Times’ David Brooks, thought they saw the Beatles tumbling down the steps from the airplane and went virtually apoplectic. But unless you were there you wouldn’t have noticed that when Bennett took the podium, he was given a rousing intro by Mitt Romney. There in the land of Mormons, where respect of the elders is elementary, Romney paid homage to the elder. And the crowd turned away from Bennett and from Romney.

We saw this in NY 23 when the rank and file lined up to oppose Conservative Party’s Doug Hoffman. We saw it just recently in the Texas primary where Cheney, George H.W. Bush, Karl Rove, Karen Hughes (W.’s proxy)and other party regulars lined up to oppose Rick Perry and Sarah Palin. Perry won in a landslide. And now the same pattern in Utah. Mitt Romney, favorite of the Bush camp, turned away on his own turf for the new conservatism.

In the U.S. this follows demographics. Power, population and economy are moving/have moved to the Southwest. They have the work force. They have the resources. They have the beginning life force that New York and New England began to experience in the 1820s. One way or another they will have the power.

In hindsight, that is what Nixon was about, that is what Reagan was about; that is what the entire post-war period which started with Eisenhower is about. The West will not be held back. Romney, a Mormon who went to Brigham Young, can call on experience back east as a Harvard Business School grad and governor of Massachusetts. But east coast credentials may be just the thing that takes it away from him in 2012

Monday, May 10, 2010

Let Greeks be Greeks, Italians Italians – and an Italian Pope, please

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 5/10/10

Robert Samuelson, the economist at the Washington Post, has a good column today about the decline of the welfare state, citing Greece, and making the obvious suggestion that we face the same circumstances, simply calling welfare, “entitlements.” Samuelson seems to have been ahead of the pack right along. Earlier on he advised economists to study history. No doubt he is right this time too. But I’m sensing globalization is taking a hit as well. And opposition, which this last century and a half wore the mask of internationalism, may this time find the human face of regionalism. This “new regionalism” might even be called – to coin a phrase - federalism

What I found most interesting in his piece is this: “Euro coins and notes were introduced in 2002. . . It was supposed to lubricate faster economic growth by eliminating the cost and confusion of constantly converting between national currencies. More important, it would promote political unity. With a common currency, people would feel ‘European. ‘Their identities as Germans, Italians and Spaniards would gradually blend into a continental identity.”

Where did the idea come from that because Europeans had a single currency they would suddenly begin to think of themselves as one people? Did the same people who made this judgment which is essentially anthropological, make the same fiscal and economic judgments? Because it is a different realm of thinking and each requires different kinds and types of thinkers. My guess is that it was just post-war zeitgeist; the cult of the CEO. In the “participation mystique” of post-war, everyone in the world was an American by degree (or like the current Supreme Court, everyone a New Yorker by degree). Europe, China, everywhere, following the rising American post-war victory march of outwardly expanding capital. Europe was European because all the world looked to New York as its culture capital and to New York, Greeks, Italians, Bosnians, Slovenians, Ukrainians, Germans, etc. were and are all the same; generic Europeans.

What high contrast to the world of Roosevelt and Eisenhower. When the war was drawing to a close Eisenhower hired on Ruth Benedict to help determine how Japan would respond to American conquest and best recover. The result was Benedict’s classic, “The Chrysanthemum and the Sword.” I don’t recall and such classic initiated on the thinking of a unified Europe. But I do remember Yeats comment, “ . . . the center no longer holds” published between the wars. Eisenhower brought in Swiss psychiatrist C.G. Jung to answer the same question about Germany.

Was any such expertise brought in to actually explain how Europeans would react to a single currency? Why would they suddenly see themselves as one people? Would Greeks start acting like Germans and Swiss, getting up at 4 am to correctly align their wood piles in the mountains? Would Germans start acting like Italians? The assumption was, in fact, they would all start – continue –acting like Americans. A variety of things outside the flow of capital including temperature, terrain and geography, tradition, religious heritage and traditional antagonism, make up a people. But many economists today, like Paul Krugman, see the world as a mechanical economic process; a clockwork orange – a clockwork Greece and Italy. It is painfully misguided. The price now will be high. People return to their nature to restore their humanity. Anthropologists from an earlier day, like Mircea Eliade, would have told them this.

Lest we forget, the world followed America to globalization in the post-war period even to the point of the Catholic Church abandoning its tradition and its “center culture” of centuries by bringing in a non-Italian pope in a new globalist marketing package, ignoring the ancestors and taking its cues from Fox news. But the globalization of the Church with the election of the Polish John Paul II in 1978 was immediately followed b y the rise of Ayatollah Koemenie in 1979 and the globalization on Islam, the “Shadow of God” which – as “Lost” watchers should understand by now - chronically follows her everywhere, like a “twin”, including here to Times Square, when the prelate leaves the island. ‘Twas ever thus. May I make a suggestion to the Roman Catholics? Put the wine back in the bottle. Next time around, please, an Italian Pope.

Sunday, May 09, 2010

How Clinton-era “diversity” hobbled black progress

30 years ago I had an essay in the Philadelphia Inquirer making the point that racial segregation in the South had become a project primarily to satisfy the white liberal temperament of northern people, but while the South had effectively integrated in the 1960s, the north and Philadelphia, where I lived, had not.The South, white and black, shared a cultural core in religion, primarily Baptist, of a form which might be considered indigenous to America and to that region, while both religious Southern whites and blacks were inherently alien to the commence-based materialistic culture of the north. (“Horse-worshipin’ Yankees,” wrote one detractor.)

Not long after I worked in a very good college in the South which made sincere effort to integrate along those deep and resonant lines of culture, region and religion. It was a great opportunity for the South. Economy was booming. Poor blacks and blacks from the country where heart was trusted over head could find a natural and organic cohesion with whites in the Baptist chapel. But what destroyed those honest attempts can be understood in two words: diversity and globalization.

Diversity became the buzzword in the Clinton era. It took the college administrator, whose job it was to raise funds, off the hook. The problems related to race in the South no longer need be seen as specific economic issues caused by specific historic conditions; problems fully amenable and with corrections well underway. They became instead aesthetic issues. Race and ethnicity became an abstraction: Prejudice is so fifties. And not just prejudice against blacks, but against everybody. You could substitute Chinese instead. Rich ones. Or East Indians. Rich ones. Or gay people, or Iranians, or Valley Girls or Zoroastrians. The possibilities were endless.

The few rural and religious blacks brought in after that were like Kafka’s hunger artist: Short term exotic novelties lost and forgotten in the hay. They huddled by themselves – country bumpkins virtually outcast in the new upscale cultural environment – with the few religious Southern whites in the Pat Robertson corner.Travelling recently with one of my sons to those same Southern colleges these past weeks, the morph seemed complete. There were tons of Indians, Chinese and other Asians on campuses. Money talks. I inquired a while back and was told that rich foreign students, very many who pay full boat and are generous alumni, pay the way for poor blacks and poor white kids.

The school tour guide in one school in particular that had a long and laudable Baptist tradition going back to the 1840s, was obviously embarrassed by the Southern religious heritage. She was from New Jersey. Yes, there were Baptists here long ago but now this is the center of the school, she said, proudly pointing to her sorority house. She guided the tour away from the historic chapel and avoided the topics of race, religion and culture like the plague.

No question, the school was fully globalized. But there seemed to be only enough American black students - great looking ones, like models for J. Crew or Abercrombie & Fitch - in view to supply the school’s front office in years ahead and the college brochures and to give a little talk on MLK day.

In the beginning, the issue was slavery and the attitudes of a culture abandoned economically for 100 years after the Civil War. In the South these are existential issues; the South is and always will be a biracial culture with white and black sharing a religion, a culture, a home. These were and are problems the South will solve and are solving itself. Here in the north, race is avocation; a worthy project and a chance to do the right thing. But we in the north lose interest and move on to something else – as we did after the Civil War - as it is not really our home.

Saturday, May 08, 2010

Black and white in the age of Obama

30 years ago I had an essay in the Philadelphia Inquirer making the point that racial segregation in the South had become a project primarily to satisfy the dominant liberal temperament of northern people and while the South had effectively integrated in the 1960s, the north and Philadelphia, where I lived, had not.

The South, white and black, shared a core in religion, primarily Baptist, of a form which might be considered indigenous to America and to that region, while both religious Southern whites and blacks were inherently alien to the commence-based culture of the north. (“Horse-worshipin’ Yankees,” wrote one detractor.)

Not long after I worked in a very good college in the South which made sincere effort to integrate along those deep and resonant lines of culture, region and religion. It was John Hope Franklin who made the point that black and white in the South shared culture and created one another.

It was a great opportunity for the South. Economy was booming. Poor blacks and blacks from the country where heart was trusted over head could find a natural and organic cohesion with whites in the Baptist chapel. But what destroyed those honest attempts can be understood in two words: diversity and globalization.

Diversity became the buzzword in the Clinton era. It took the college administrator, whose job it was to raise funds, off the hook. The problem no longer need be seen as economic; Southern blacks left out of regional economy. It became aesthetic: Prejudice is so fifties. And not just against blacks, against everybody. You could substitute Chinese instead. Rich ones. Or East Indians. Rich ones. Or gay people, or Iranians, or Valley Girls or Zoroastrians. The possibilities were endless.

The few rural and religious blacks brought in after that were like Kafka’s hunger artist: Short term novelties lost and forgotten in the hay. They huddled by themselves – country bumpkins virtually outcast in the new upscale cultural environment – with the few religious Southern whites in the Pat Robertson corner.

Travelling recently with one of my sons to those same Southern colleges these past weeks, the morph seems complete. There were tons of Indians, Chinese and other Asians on campus. Money talks. I inquired a while back and was told that the rich Asians, who pretty much pay full boat and are generous alumni, pay the way for poor blacks and poor white kids like mine.

The school tour guide in one school in particular that had a long and laudable Baptist tradition going back to the 1840s, was obviously embarrassed by the religious heritage. She was from New Jersey. Yes, there were Baptists here long ago but now this is the center of the school, she said, proudly pointing to her sorority house. She guided the tour away from the historic chapel and avoided the topics of race, religion and culture like the plague.

No question, the school was fully globalized, although the diversity of the student body seemed to reflect every race, ethnicity, creed, code and sexual orientation they have in New Jersey. Maybe that is what they mean by globalization; all different, yet all the same, like Pete Seeger’s little boxes. But there seemed to be only enough black students - great looking ones too, all in J. Crew and Abercrombie & Fitch - in view to supply the school’s front office in years ahead and the college brochures and to give a little talk on MLK day.

Friday, May 07, 2010

Failure

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 5/7/10

Countries fail because the third post-war generation lacks the courage and determination and sense of continuity in crisis that the first generation (Roosevelt, Eisenhower) had. It is like inheriting money. By the third generation there is nothing left. In fact, those qualities which bring the country out of the despair and back to equilibrium - warrior qualities - are scorned by the third generation. President Obama appealed to the horde in his Mile High speech at the Democratic Convention and this week encourages the mob on Cinco de Mayo. He attacks and seems to abjure the power-building archetype of Wall Street with the low and adolescent theater of televised show trials. So do his first officers, Pelosi, Reid and Barney Frank. Too bad. The result is always the same. When the panic sets in, the country then turns in desperation again for someone unflappable like Roosevelt or Eisenhower. Someone like Mitt Romney. Although it may be said that turning over the country to the founder and captain of Bain Capital is a little like volunteering for receivership. But that could truly be said about Roosevelt as well.

The one thousand point drop in the Dow Jones yesterday shows a country, a world, on the edge of a nervous breakdown. Possibly someone hit the wrong button and sent the world spiraling. The Greek riots promise instability in Europe. China faces bubble problems. My excellent senator Judd Gregg says that California is our Greece.

A historic change can be grafted as a power arc in the rise and decline of England which started when Lord Nelson brought the English-speaking world to dominance over Napoleon in 1805. Then this week it was said that an important shift in the British elections yesterday was when Simon Cowell, the bitchy judge on American Idol, made a desperate pitch for the conservatives in The Sun. It was indeed a critical moment for England and in the absence of Nelson, she found Cowell. If they did not bring in a conservative Parliament, they would not bring in the austerity measures needed to save the currency, to save the stock market, to save England from sinking to the status of Greece. They did not. From Nelson to Cowell. Victoria’s bookends.

Now England is like the noble Duke of York: When they were up they were up, when they were down they were down. But now they are only half way up and neither up nor down.The royal princes may take a look at Canada. It is great and vast and steady and sober and they still have Don Cherry and Sid the Kid Crosby to shore up the manlies. Us too.

Wednesday, May 05, 2010

Mike Bloomberg joins the Zombie Jamboree

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 4/5/10

Mike Bloomberg, mayor of New York, assured the public that there would be no racial profiling of Muslims or Arabs in New York City after the bombing attempt at Times Square. But unfortunately, the night before, when egged on by that panting puppy, Katie Couric, who suggested "a home-grown," suspicion, the mayor replied: "Home-grown, maybe a mentally deranged person or somebody with a political agenda that doesn't like the health care bill or something.” Tea Partier. Got it.

There was a time in New York City when the heart was Southern, and if your didn’t have Southern blood like Truman Capote, Harper Lee or Willa Carther, you were probably not that good. It was a golden age for magazines with Mississippi’s Willie Morris at Harper’s, North Carolina’s Harold T.P. Hays at Esquire and Howell Raines at the New York Times. In his comment Bloomberg, who grew up in a tribal Boston suburb where everyone was identified by their ethnicity; Jewish, Irish, Italian, WASP, shows all the sophistication of the current batch of provincials at the New York Times who see “Jesus land” as a boiling pot of fascism, and like Ilsa in “Casablanca,” long for Paris. But – jut, alors! – the train has left the station. Even the English today ditch the accent when they move to Hollywood, otherwise it will mean low theater like Dancing with the Stars or Fox news. A successful New York or Chicago politician would in the formal model of “Miller’s Crossing,” hook up with an Irish sidekick to enter the native world of intuition. Bloomberg’s got one. We’re supposed to have that primordial nature thing although we couldn’t organize a cat fight.

New York City is as Bloomberg says, the greatest city in the world. But it is an American city and any New Yorker who doesn’t’ understand that is provincial and like the South of the 1940s, locked in the nostalgia of the Grand Tour. It is sometimes a condition of us Boston ethnics, last to arrive at the table and late for dinner. Sociologists say we look back for three generations to Ireland, Poland, Germany, China or wherever we came from. Then we become Americans. In this regard, Italian New Yorker Rudy Giuliani, who was not that long ago married in Graceland I have heard, the capital of Jesus land, is the more American, the less provincial of New York’s recent mayors. New York is closer to Nashville than it is to Paris. It must be.

Kevin Sheekey, Bloomberg’s Irish sidekick, might present for the mayor and his helpers a kind of cultural sensitivity training, for those stuck in this shadow of history. Bring them against their will to watch a few Toby Keith videos (“I love this bar,” Wayman’s Song), and sit in on a few sermons by Pastor Hagee. Suggested reading: W.J.Cash’s “Mind of the South,” John Hope Franklin and C. Vann Woodward’s “The Burden of Southern History.” Start the session with the Taylor Swift happy dance. (Which incidently, has 40 million hits on You Tube.)

Where Bloomberg and I grew up ethnicity and prejudice formed our consciousness. We Irish were taught that Southern white people were inferior to us as they were inbred and dangerous. We Irish were taught that Jews were naturally smarter than we were and had to be watched because they would take over everything. We have found great personal success in a collective generational ego fueled by post-war dollars, but the new Rubin Museum in Chelsea aside, Mike Bloomberg’s New York City is more provincial and less fierce, less artistically driven and mature than the New York days of Pollock, Capote, Alfred Kazin, D.T. Suzuki and Kenneth Burke; than high-church lawyers who shook the world like Telford Taylor and street fighters like Norman Mailer. But they smoked in those days. The artist today might do better to follow the endless child Tintin to Tibet.

Possibly the WASPS saw us coming and just let us in when they moved to Texas, much as the Southern planters did when they handed the plantations over to the black field hands at the end of the Civil War, and headed west.

Sunday, May 02, 2010

Make New York City a terrorist-free zone: A states’ rights defense against Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 5/3/10

We might be at the sea change when CNN reports that it was a Vietnam veteran who noticed smoke from the car bomb intended to blow up Times Square. The degradation of Vietnam vets came from a society which couldn’t face the difficult realities of democratic life and represented soldier/action man – those who could - as a drug addict, “baby killer” and psycho. But here he is now with instinct, awareness, responsiveness and courage. He is Master Chief; he is Zen Man. He, the soldier, the veteran, is the culture’s one essential element; the fundamental building block of a free society. Possibly we are turning a corner. Maybe the black flags can start to come down now.

The incident may even bring even New York City, which prides itself on its inability to deal effectively with terrorism, much as Boston did before Christmas, to a fighting stance. The Christmas bomber brought Scott Brown to the Senate and brought New England – like the Kind in Lord of the Rings - out of its pseudo-pacifist trance. Possibly this could do the same for New York City.

It couldn’t happen at a better time for New York, for America. A week before Mahmoud Ahmadinejad comes to New York City to gloat. New Yorkers should not let it happen.“Prime Minister Netanyahu's senior ministers have arrest warrants waiting for them in Europe's capital cities - while mass murderer Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is invited to lecture at Columbia University,” my Israeli friend Moshe Feiglin wrote last month. Now Ahmadinejad comes to the UN.

Certainly Hillary will grant him a passport. The Clintons, although generational figures; Sixties people and not real New Yorkers – denial again – have been snuggling up to terrorists since the Oslo Agreements. Real New Yorkers should stop this from happening.

I hope the governor of Arizona is not aiming for annulment with her new immigration law. As Texas Governor Rick Perry said, it is a bad law. It is especially bad as states sovereignty posture following the wave and appealing to complex and low populist passions. But I bet New York City could find a great states rights defense against Ahmadinejad right now and prevent his entering the city; my city, the greatest city in the world.

There are so many different ways to make this not happen. But New York has, since the Sixties, come to see protest as an end in itself. That is, the idea that a bunch of people going outside to pout, as per the Saul Alinsky handbook, is in itself satisfying. It is zero sum. It makes no different to these people if it succeeds or fails. They like to fail. It relieves them of the responsibilities of governance; of adulthood. They substitute easy tasks for responsibility: Yes, we welcome terrorists like Yasser Arafat and Ahmadinejad, even Kali, the Death Mother, but we have a very strong bottle bill. At the beginning of the war on Iraq, which I opposed, we offered a price for the war on Iraq: State secession. A “states rights defense against Dick Cheney.” Seems to have caught on. There has to be a price extracted; there has to be an object, or it is just a play of conspicuous piety, and New Yorkers have been doing this for 40 years now.

The plan should be two parts: One, Ahmadinejad will not speak, will not arrive in New York City. Two: What are the options?

Because the UN is irrelevant to the moral core of the greatest city of the world and so it a federal government that would grant a high terrorist like Ahmadinejad a visa. And if New York City meets the needs and demands of these aerial abstractions that hover above her like the space ships in V, she loses her moral core; she loses her soul; she loses everything.

Profile

Bernie Quigley is a prize-winning magazine writer and has worked more than 30 years as a book and magazine editor, political commentator and book, movie, music and art reviewer. His essays on politics and world affairs have appeared in The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Philadelphia Daily News and other newspapers and magazines. He has published poetry in Painted Bride Quarterly and has written dozens of magazine articles. For 20 years he has been an amateur farmer, raising Tunis sheep and organic vegetables. He has written hundreds of columns for "Pundits Blog" in "The Hill" a political journal in Washington, D.C. He lives in the White Mountains with his wife and four children.